Colm Tóibín

Interview with Colm Toibin

The Literary Luncheon Series

Colm Toibin sees peaceful skies

16 February 2000

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Colm Toibin was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1955 and currently lives in Dublin. He has received several awards for his earlier novels, The South, The Heather Blazing and The Story of the Night. He has also written the non-fiction books Bad Blood, Homage to Barcelona and The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe. He is in Australia as a guest in the Sydney Mardi Gras.

Here, he talks to an SMH/Dymocks Literary Lunch at the Westin Hotel on February 16, introduced by Susan Wyndham.

In town as part of the Mardi Gras Speak program and speaking at The Sydney Morning Herald/Dymocks Literary Luncheon at the Westin Hotel, the Booker Prize-nominated author, journalist and travel writer was a study in optimism.

Citing the proliferation of truces worldwide, from Northern Ireland to Palestine, Toibin said the recent political climate of peacemaking would push Australia's leaders to a similar reconciliation with the Aboriginal community.

"It's so obvious that it has to be done, and I am optimistic that it will happen, as it has all over the world," he said.

"In recent years the Clinton presidency has shown there is a genuine hunger out there for the shaking of hands ... and the creating of space for all," said Toibin, who headlined the Perth Writer's Festival last week and whose most recent novel, The Blackwater Lightship, was short-listed for the 1999 Booker MacConnell Prize.

While the bitter legacy of sectarianism remained in Northern Ireland, a homeland still "awash with guns and awash with grief" was slowly coming to terms with its history, he said.

Making peace with the past was particularly important for Ireland's literary and gay communities, both steeped in the country's "melancholy history".

As the country moved uncertainly towards reconciliation, there was a need to reflect the changes in fiction.

"For a long while, no Irish novel ended with a wedding, there was no Irish Jane Austen, no images of domestic comfort and celebration," he said..

"But I'm becoming more and more conscious of the need for a big wedding, to see if I can break the mould. It's been the case in gay fiction for some time now, and I'm trying to make it so in Irish writing."